Shackles
by SadameHime
Summary: Some chains never break. They may take your collar off of you, but the binds of Caesar never loosen on your mind, Roscia. No matter how far you run, no matter what jobs you take.. You will always be a woman of the Legion, Courier Number Six.


_But the truth is.. The game was rigged from the start._

Roscia had never known darkness quite like the kind that consumed her as she took a bullet to her head. People told her that, in the face of death, their life flashed before their eyes. They probably never got shot in the head, because when she stared down the barrel of a 9mm aimed at her pretty little head, her life didn't get the chance to remind her of the good times and the bad. It went dark in a flash, the words of a woman that had been her acting mother rang so loud in her head that she couldn't remember the sound of the shot.

_They beat us. They whip us, but we are safe here. We are safe from death we do not deserve._

She did not deserve this bullet in her head. Roscia did not deserve to die in the middle of nowhere, never experiencing a comfortable life. She would have told herself that if she knew any semblance of consciousness other than the uncomfortable fear of death. Just like the bullet, in surged into her before the darkness fell over her eyes and all thoughts fell quiet. She was dead. Roscia was dead.

* * *

><p>Doc Mitchell had seen head shots before. The Courier's case was peculiar, but not new. What intrigued him about the poor woman was not the bullet in her head, but the marks around her neck. One, great big band of pale white skin stretched around her frail little neck, but aside from that, her skin was tanned like everyone else's. She had scars everywhere, little white lashes where cuts had been; big, walloped bruises in places she had been hurt.<p>

The robot had brought her in half naked, stripped down to her skivvies. God only knew what he had been up to before she had been shot, and Doc Mitchell didn't really want to know. She was a pretty girl, and whatever man got to be with her was a lucky son of a gun.

Her pretty eyes came open as he took a moment to examine her, and even in her dizzied state, deliriousness blazing over her expressive blue orbs, she was self-conscious enough to try and cover the marks upon her neck in shame. Good enough for him that she was still in there.

"Good morning, miss. Can you speak to me? Do you remember your name?"

As a girl, people called her Annie. That was before the Legion came. After that, they called her Roscia, her new name given to her upon introduction to Caesar's Legion. Like all young girls, she served a time of slavery before being given a new purpose: to serve as breeding stock. A young Legionary would have claimed her as his bride, had she not ran the day she heard the news. She never knew his name nor saw his face, but she feared being pacified further. Her daring run out of a border camp led her to the Mojave, and everywhere she ran, the Legion seemed to follow.

Not on purpose of course or at least, that is what Roscia assumed. Their campaign to unite the tribes led them to Hoover Dam, and there they had remained fighting for many years now. She avoided any word of the Legion like the plague, performing her duties as a Courier with little interruption until package number six.

With this in mind, she looked at Doc Mitchell and said one simple sentence: "Roscia. Roscia's my name…"

* * *

><p>She left with a ruined memory, much of her childhood lost in the shrapnel of the bullet in her head, and she set out from Goodsprings with two goals: to complete her contract and to avoid the Legion. She knew what to look for to complete both of these goals.<p>

For the Legion, any smoke and any sound similar to echoing war drums would be a sure sign that a town had been invaded and she had to stay away. The big red 'X' upon her back would be sign enough that she had been a woman of the Legion once, and they would take her away, and after finding out who she was, would deliver her to the man who would have been her husband—should he not have taken another bride yet- or enslave her again for her transgressions. She had served her time in her early teens, and she would carry no heavy burdens again. It was for her avoidance of smoke that she narrowly escaped a party of Legionaries in Nipton.

Roscia had never known light quite like the kind that radiated off of New Vegas. Even from Novac, the lights made her almost confident enough to stride right down the broken road and right into the last great city in the Southwest, but no. She waited and went with her instincts. She listened to Boone.

When Boone saw Roscia for the first time, he knew she had been a slave from the get-go. The tan-line left upon her neck could be from nothing else, and he felt a quiet rage swell up in him. She had walked so far alone, done so much alone, and yet she had once been a slave; a slave to the people that had taken Carla, had taken Roscia, and only Roscia had the good fortune to escape, to know a better life after Caesar's Legion.

_I don't remember much about my childhood. I had a sister, or at least.. I think I did. The bullet scrambled my memories.. I mean, the face I picture with my sister is the same as the face of a girl I grew up with in Flagstaff._

As they walked together toward New Vegas, Boone realized that the woman rarely went quiet. When she did, it was important, and the silence never awkward. She bounced all of her revelations and ideas off of him in the casual hours they spent together, and while he was annoyed sometimes, he felt like he helped her more by listening than putting a bullet into a rad scorpion that wandered onto the road.

_They weren't awful to me. Some girls had it worse.. like your Carla probably did- not to make you upset or anything, its just the only example you have, right?... Well, anyway… One of the clear memories I still have is about when they took my collar away. The Master came up to me, looked at me with the stank eye and said to me," Roscia.. You got bigger things to worry about now." And all of the sudden, I didn't have that god awful weight on my shoulder. Two days later.. I ran away._

"How did you get away?" Those five words probably sealed their conversation for the rest of the road. Boone would never hear the end of it.

_It was really late one night, almost everyone was asleep and the guards that were watching us girls were..uhh.. not so interested in girls, ya get me? I noticed that they left together and.. no one was watching anymore! I thought I should say something at first but, I realized it was my chance. I got up, I tossed off my slave's garbs.. and I ran NAKED through the desert until I reached a little farmhouse. I stole some clothes from their little storage shed, and I was never to be seen or heard of again, so far as the Legion is concerned._

It seemed that the Courier began and ended almost all of her adventures either naked, or half so. Boone wondered if the Legionaries didn't let her go just to watch her run away completely naked, her lithe body bouncing around in the dry, sandy winds. All of the images that came to his mind were quickly smothered in disgust. Thinking of her like that just felt wrong. She seemed too innocent, too easily taken advantage of. The Legion had made her weak, and the Mojave intended to break her before she even got her revenge.

Roscia wasn't a curvy woman by any standard. The only thing she had going for her physically were her modestly sized breasts, large enough to gather attention but small enough that her back suffered little. To call her unattractive would be a grave injustice, but Boone's mind had long been tricked by grief to ignore any woman but Carla.

_Carlia_

Roscia had a habit of getting him to think about his wife quite often. It seemed that the number of times she brought the woman up in conversation nearly equaled the amount of miles they put behind them as he followed her to the Vegas Strip looking for his higher purpose. There was something better than Novac out there for him, and for Roscia, there was at least something.


End file.
